If you’re a network techie like me, you will probably be very interested to know how Singapore’s OpenNet fibre-to-the-home network works. What is the technology that runs the fibre-to-the-home network? How is it related to the fibre optic networks that are already common place in enterprise and campus environments? There isn’t much engineering information you can easily find, at least not from IDA and OpenNet themselves. However, with help from Google search, I’ve managed to find a variety of information…
Monthly Archives: March 2011
SSL Certificates: Single-Root vs Chained-Root
I recently renewed a bunch of SSL certificates. I actually use a reseller, Namecheap.com, but the actual SSL certificate authority is RapidSSL. I’ve bought RapidSSL’s SSL certificates for several years. They are cheap (particularly through a reseller like Namecheap.com), and they work as as good as the very expensive ones from the competition. RapidSSL’s SSL certificates were single-root certificates, making them easy and straight-forward for the user (i.e. the administrator of the SSL-protected service) to install.
Observing Earth Hour 2011
Earth Hour in 2011 is observed on 26th March, from 8:30pm to 9:30pm. People around the globe will switch off lights and commit to actions that go beyond the hour. At http://zitseng.com/, I will observe Earth Hour by switching to a dimmed style for the website. It’s not quite the same as switching off the lights, but if you think about AMOLED displays, less power is consumed to display a dimmed page. It’s a show of support. I started to…
Samsung ST550 Review
I was setting out to upgrade the firmware of my Samsung ST550 digital compact camera when I realized I hadn’t mentioned about it at all on this blog. So, here’s a quick mini-review of it. The camera was launched around the end of 2009. I bought it at one of the major Singapore computer shows not too long after that (that means probably in early 2010). This is one of those spur-of-the-moment purchase. I hadn’t gone to the computer show…
Horrors of Online Banking
At the risk of sounding like I’m technophobic, distrustful of the Internet, and terrified of online money transactions… I am indeed starting to find online banking and online payments rather worrisome to some extent. It’s not that I’m afraid of online banking or online payments. I’ve been living on the Internet for long enough, I’ve done banking online and shopped online for some time. But a couple of bad experiences this year has got me thinking that some of these…
Virtual Ubuntu
Then, after installing Gentoo Linux yesterday, today I had a go at Ubuntu. This time, instead of a spare PC, I installed it in a virtual machine in my MacBook Pro. I know, this is hardly a fair comparison, but let’s just hear me out, because I’m just totally awed by the setup experience. It was just so easy, even considering my increased expectations of how Linux distributions ought to have become.
Revisiting Gentoo Linux
I spent a part of today installing Gentoo Linux in a spare PC. If you’ve not heard of it, Gentoo is yet another Linux distribution. It stands out from the rest in that practically everything you install is actually compiled from source code locally. It’s not my first experience with Gentoo… I had a go at it when it was newly launched around 2002. It’s a hacker’s distribution. Not very much fun, and if you asked me, I wouldn’t want…